From investor calls (where they actually can’t lie, at least not without fines and losing their jobs), they’ve had test samples of meteor lake for awhile already, which uses Intel 4. They’ve even had successful power-on samples for their 20A node (maybe also 18A?). It sounds like Intel is finally making some advancements on their process roadmap. Of course we’ll have to wait and see if they can hit acceptable yields, or if 4 becomes the next Intel 7 debacle. (Hopefully not)
I think Intel’s current leadership is slowing righting the ship, it just takes time in this space. It seems like Intel is making the right moves for 5-10 years from now instead of trying to maximize short term returns.
I would argue that intel has been surprisingly successful even in the short term, in terms of CPUs.
They had the 10th gen where AMD was clearly better performing and more efficient, but they competed. They had 11th gen which was a failure.
But until recent price cuts, Alder Lake wins on performance and price against a lot of AMD chips. Alder lake is doing that at a serious process disadvantage vs AMD - alder lake is not TSMC but intel 7 which is their 10nm enhanced finfet process. That intel is even close to competing with AMD when so far behind on process is pretty amazing, a testament to their chip design.
If they get their manufacturing and research back under control in the medium to long term they're golden. But even without that, I bet they're making a whole lot more money per chip fabbing it themselves than AMD is buying TSMC.
I agree. They were helped somewhat by the pandemic and chip shortages from everyone else, but what could have been a disaster for Intel ended up being only a small blemish. If Intel gets back on track AMD is back in the position of chasing Intel in the cpu space and Nvidia in the GPU space. Worse for them is if Intel starts being a serious contender in GPUs.
The size of this chip at 4 square millimeters is pretty small, it probably makes for a good test chip before trying to tape out chonkier chips that would have a much higher fault rate.
